Mobile Industry News

Review: Outlook Good for Gwabbit, Xobni Add-Ons
Lots of us depend on Microsoft’s venerable Outlook for e-mail and contacts. And after all these years, there’s still plenty of ways it can improve. Just try to dig up an old e-mail with Outlook’s primitive search tool. At least Microsoft has encouraged a cottage industry for third-party Outlook add-ons that can help. I’ve been testing two handy ones — Gwabbit from Technicopia in Carmel Valley, Calif., and Xobni from a San Francisco start-up of the same name. Gwabbit, which I first saw at the Demo tech conference last month, provides a simple way to add contacts to your Outlook address book using information pulled from incoming e-mails. Xobni was unveiled in September 2007 at the TechCrunch conference. But the versatile plug-in (”in-box” spelled backward) just shed its beta label at the end of March. Xobni’s most appealing function is to provide an easy way to sift through your Outlook in-box so you can rapidly find people, conversations and file attachments. A closer look at these potentially helpful tools: Gwabbit: Look, Ma, No Typing Typing contact information into your Outlook address book is tedious — all of those phone numbers, company names, job titles and such. Gwabbit automates that drill — within limitations — so contacts can get added whenever you receive e-mail from a new person. Because of the time it saves, Gwabbit is worth the one-time $20 fee, which kicks in after a 14-day free trial. It will soon cost $10 to load Gwabbit on a second PC. Gwabbit lifts — or “gwabs” — data from the “signature” or text block in an e-mail, assuming there is one. A Gwabbit alert pop ups about 3 seconds after you open a message. Inside is a button you click to automatically populate the new contact fields in Outlook. You can ignore a contact, too. Gwabbit claims to get.

Contacts Fast Add
Save a new phone number with less than half the taps needed when using the built-in Contacts App. If the App Store were Gran Turismo 2, this App is one of those NA Tuning upgrades that gave you a 5 HP boost. Or at least, that’s the idea. It basically makes saving someone’s number at low time.

Gmail iPhone Sync

Do you want a wireless sync feature for your iPhone? If you have an iPhone and use Google Calendar and Gmail Contacts you will be happy to know that you can now seamlessly and continuously sync your iPhone to your Google account. Using the Exchange features of the iPhone, with added support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync protocol, you can setup a new Exchange accout on your iPhone that connects to your Google account which does a 2 way sync and populates your iPhone Contacts and Calendar apps. The steps for setting up Gmail to iPhone sync are: Important! Before you begin: Make sure your device has version 2.2 firmware or above Back up your Contacts and Calendar events on your iPhone. When setting up a new Exchange ActiveSync account on your iPhone, all existing Contacts and Calendar events will be deleted from your iPhone. Please make sure to back up any important data before you set up Google Sync. 1. Open the Settings application on your device’s home screen. 2. Open Mail, Contacts, Calendars. 3. Tap Add Account…. 4. Select Microsoft Exchange. 5. In the Email field, enter the name of the account (anything you’d like). 6. Leave the Domain field blank. 7. Enter your full Google Account email address as the Username. 8. Enter your Google Account password as the Password. 9. Tap Next at the top of your screen. 10. A new Server field will appear. Enter m.google.com. 11. Press Next at the top of your screen again. 12. Select the Google services you want to sync. Currently only Contacts and Calendar are supported. Make sure that you have uploaded your data before proceeding. 13. Press Sync twice when warned about data loss. Synchronization will begin automatically if you have Push enabled on your phone. From now on every time you open the Calendar or Contacts app your information will be synced wireless after a few seconds. Don’t enable email on the Exchange account as this will not work with Google. You can add an IMAP account for your Gmail account on the iPhone which is a good alternative to POP3. Here is a video demo of Gmail iPhone Syn using Exchange Try with TestiPhone.